• by March 23, 2011

IBM is committed to "integrating Web analytics across channels," said Yuchun Lee, vice president/GM IBM Enterprise Marketing Management Group, and co-founder of Unica, in a keynote address at OMMA Metrics Wednesday morning. IBM, he said, has spent $2.5 billion in the space in the past year -- all through acquisitions, including that of Unica, bought six months ago.

During the next four years, Lee continued, IBM plans to spend another $20 billion on such acquisitions.

Separately, on Monday, IBM launched a campaign for what it calls "Smarter Commerce," described as a "new category" addressing "the spectrum of enterprise commerce activities -- new ways to buy, sell and secure greater customer loyalty in the era of mobile and social networks."

Combining CRM (customer relationship management), ERP (enterprise resource planning) and SCM (supply chain management) will result in the "next generation enterprise platform for business," Lee said.

An IBM survey of more than 1,000 chief marketing officers -- with a budget that Lee says dwarfs last year's Unica outlay -- is now underway, as IBM strives "to develop best practices, services and solutions."

Lee said that Web analytics is "at the center" of all of it, and pointed to three key cross-channel marketing trends: * Digitization of all channels, in addition to online. Such channels, he said, include kiosks, interactive billboards and point of sale, and tie into IBM's initiative for universal tags.

* A systematic maturity of measurement, from traffic to behavioral analysis. Digital behavior, he said, represents "the earliest indicator of what the customer is looking for."

* Integration within suites, including online optimization, ecommerce, marketing and enterprise. This will include SaaS (software as a service), appliances and hybrids such as email done through SaaS.